Just when academics were beginning to get to grips with blogging, along came podcasting.

A new but increasingly popular medium, podcasting allows people to download audio files from the internet and listen to them on an MP3 player wherever and whenever they like.

Universities in America and Canada are beginning to integrate the technology into coursework as well as using it as a method of communication with each other and the outside world.

The word podcast itself is a combination of the word broadcasting and the name of the popular Apple MP3 player better known as the iPod.

But you don't need iPod to podcast. In fact, podcasts can be used with a variety of digital audio formats and play on many MP3 player or portable digital audio devices as well as most computers.

The heart of the podcasting movement may be rooted in the world of blogs, but while blogosphere has grown largely on the written word, podcasts add a soundtrack. What also makes them unique is that they are sent directly to the people who want them.

In the academic world, podcasts are giving departments, staff and students the freedom and informality of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper.

Officials at Canada's McMaster University are using podcasts to attract potential students as they seek to boost their recruitment drive, telling students what is on offer at their campus, using a medium to which young people can relate.

At the ivy league Georgetown University, researchers are using podcasts to publish their findings, reaching millions of listeners all over the globe. Other institutions, like the University of Florida, are earning extra money from adverts broadcasted on podcasts.

At Oregon State University, postgraduate students are presenting their thesis not on projectors but on streaming audios via podcast.

"The podcasting project is helping our community in a new world of grassroots media creation and new channels for sharing ideas," says Sam Stern, the dean of the faculty of education at the university. "It is part of our intention to help learning get beyond some of its traditional areas."

A spokesman for the University of Florida expressed a similar sentiment.

"On a large campus like ours, it is important to provide as many options as possible to our students, faculty and staff to receive university news," he said. "For many, podcasting will replace the more traditional communications tools in use today. It's definitely the wave of the future."

This belief is shared by many academics, especially the increasing numbers of the Atari and Apple II generation now taking up teaching positions across American universities.

Many of these young academics find it easy to introduce the technology to a new generation of students weaned on the internet and iPod.

Casey Alt symbolises this movement. A 1999 Stanford University graduate, Dr Alt is Duke University's administrative director for information science and information studies. He believes that podcasts and other digital media are already fundamentally transforming the way American academic institutions function and will continue to do so at an accelerated pace.

"Many people in academia have begun to recognise that the average first-year student shows up to his or her first day of classes with more tacit digital literacy than many of their lecturers combined," Dr Alt says. "They have started designing mechanisms for harnessing those capabilities by building them into the pedagogical and research processes."

Students are as keen as their lecturers on the capability of this unfolding technology. Tiffany Chen is a theatre student at Duke who had never heard of podcasting before her professor introduced her to the technology.

"Students can choose when and where they want to listen to podcasts, and I get to present my theatre work straight to the public," she says. "Podcasting also gives another impetus to make a good product beside grades."

While the fanfare may not be as loud as it is now America, some British academics are quietly embracing the technology.

Geraint Johnes is one of the world's pioneering academic podcasters. He used podcasts as a learning tool in economics during the last academic year at Lancaster University's management school.

To create the podcasts, he recorded a series of three-minute clips based on topics in his final year undergraduate human resource economics course. These were recorded as .wav files using the Windows sound recorder, and then converted to mp3 files.

Students were then given the web address for the internet feed. To retrieve the podcasts, he asked his students to to install a podcast receiver on their computer.

"Podcasting is neat in the sense that it offers the chance to be a push technology," he says. "The podcasts just arrive on the students' machines without them having to go looking for them. Of course they still have to make the choice to listen to them."

"That's where technology ends and pedagogy comes in. You have to give some though about how you integrate the podcasts into the course."

As some academic blogs have been abused, Prof Johnes says he does not foresee similar problems with podcasts as long as they are prepared by academics for the consumption of students.

"Academics are used to publishing, they know the implication of speaking out of turn and they know what libel is," he says. "The thing is to educate people about what is and what is not acceptable in a public forum.